Just typing the title of this post made me instantly put it to music, and if you’re like me, and I should probably feel sorry for you, you heard The Knack’s ’My Sharona’. So if Mizuno ever decides to make an annoying TV spot with a sound-a-like band singing ‘My Mizunos’, you can all be witnesses when I take them to court for stealing my idea. Well, make that food court, I don’t think blogfoolery counts as copyrighted material…
Anyhoo, several weeks back I went on about how running shoes don’t last as long as they should and how would anybody know beyond what the manufacturers and running experts tell them. I’d love to see some study in The Prince Rogers Nelson Royal Academy of Medicine Journal that correlates increased shoe wear to increased foot or leg injury, but no such luck. Pretty much everything I found, at least on-line, told me about the same thing, which is: start saving up now for your next pair, sucka. However, maximum mileage varies depending on whom you ask, and that could affect your usage by several weeks.
So I bought a pair of Mizuno ‘Gel Bee-Yotches’ back in mid-May, and they passed away quietly in July after about 350 miles of service (OK, it was more like 400, but they were nice to me). Before plunking down four or five Andrews on another pair, I re-visited my research. Just to show you some of the crap I found, here are some links that show the variety, yet spirit-crushing sameness of opinion:
The ‘Run.Gear.Run’ Store, deep in the heart of Texas, giving you a calendar calculator stuck in the year 2006…
RunThePlanet.Com says: 500 miles, maybe less, we’re all going to die anyway…
CareMark; 400 miles maximum prescribe the doctors; new shoes not covered by your plan, so just forget it…
Dick’s Sporting Goods says: 350-500 Miles. Surprising Dick didn’t just go with ’20 miles’…
Running Times phones it in: Running 25 miles per week? Get three pairs of shoes a year. Next!
So while I’m waiting for somebody to provide a doctoral thesis on the documented correlation between shoe wear, rubber degradation, and injuries, I’ll have to take the ‘experts’ word for it.
What I learned over the summer holiday:
1. The damn things last 300-400 miles total. So an $80 pair depreciates in value by 20 cents a mile over 400 miles. Two bucks down on a 10-mile run, equivalent to a Grande Drip at Starbucks. Urban barista: ‘Yo, a medium redeye for ‘Hymen Idiot’!’.
2. Buy two pair, and rotate them, just like the guy showing his buttcrack does when he inspects your car and moves the damn tires around at $150 an hour. In fact, each pair will last longer, since the rubber apparently needs time to bounce back from hard surface action. No, I will not stoop to say something crude here, you can all just move along now.
3. And what they didn’t say, which is that they’re still perfectly fine shoes after their running career is over. And keep pairs with different colors, once like colors end up tossing around at the bottom of your closet they have a habit of mixing up, and one pitch black winter morning you’ll find yourself putting on two unmatched shoes. I caused much humor and glee among running comrades once when I erroneously put on two different shoes for a sleepy, dark morning run. THAT’s a different story, I’ll save that for the blooper reel.
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4 comments:
That's some mighty fine calculatin' you've been doing. I still experience shock each time I replace my shoes, but more because I can't figure out when they need replacing.
I should rotate. I know.
I thought I'd heard from various sources (but maybe it was the same source various times) that it was every 600 miles. Then I saw in (Spanish) Runner's World that it was every 600 miles. Either way, I always figured 600 was the magic number somehow (maybe how much you're supposed to spend per month on running?).
Kind of makes me want to convert to one of those barefoot road runners that do marathons and stuff.
http://www.runningbarefoot.org/
Thanks for stopping by!
Ummm...the shoe rotation conundrum, I find that old injuries will start to flare at the 300-350 mile mark, I don't scientifically try to correlate the relationship between the old nagging injuries flaring up to miles on the shoes...too much science in my life already. Therefore I usually just chuck'em before old injuries start hurting and try not to dwell on the cost per mile. I think that would cause me to freak out too frequently.
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